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Our Brains Appear Uniquely Tuned for Musical Pitch

In the eternal
search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains
are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to
music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in
part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound
Health, a joint project between the NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts, that aims
to understand the role of music in health.

“We found that a
certain region of our brains has a stronger preference for sounds with pitch
than macaque monkey brains,” says Bevil Conway, Ph.D., investigator in the
NIH’s Intramural Research Program and a senior author of the study published in
Nature Neuroscience. “The results raise the possibility that these
sounds, which are embedded in speech and music, may have shaped the basic
organization of the human brain.”

The study started
with a friendly bet between Conway and Sam Norman-Haignere, Ph.D., a
post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute for Mind,
Brain, and Behavior, and the first author of the paper.

At the time, both
were working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Conway’s team
had been searching for differences between how human and monkey brains control
vision only to discover that there are very few. Their brain mapping studies
suggested that humans and monkeys see the world in very similar ways. But then,
Conway heard about some studies on hearing being done by Norman-Haignere, who,
at the time, was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Josh H. McDermott,
Ph.D., associate professor at MIT.

“I told Bevil that
we had a method for reliably identifying a region in the human brain that
selectively responds to sounds with pitch,” says Norman-Haignere. That is when
they got the idea to compare humans with monkeys. Based on his studies, Conway
bet that they would see no differences.

Tuned for Musical Pitch: NIH-funded scientists found that our brains may be uniquely sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to speech or music. Image: Courtesy NIH

To test this, the
researchers played a series of harmonic sounds, or tones, to healthy volunteers
and monkeys. Meanwhile, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used
to monitor brain activity in response to the sounds. The researchers also
monitored brain activity in response to sounds of toneless noises that were
designed to match the frequency levels of each tone played.

At first glance,
the scans looked similar and confirmed previous studies. Maps of the auditory
cortex of human and monkey brains had similar hot spots of activity regardless
of whether the sounds contained tones.

However, when the
researchers looked more closely at the data, they found evidence suggesting the
human brain was highly sensitive to tones. The human auditory cortex was much
more responsive than the monkey cortex when they looked at the relative
activity between tones and equivalent noisy sounds.

“We found that
human and monkey brains had very similar responses to sounds in any given
frequency range. It’s when we added tonal structure to the sounds that some of
these same regions of the human brain became more responsive,” says Conway.
“These results suggest the macaque monkey may experience music and other sounds
differently. In contrast, the macaque’s experience of the visual world is
probably very similar to our own. It makes one wonder what kind of sounds our
evolutionary ancestors experienced.”

Further experiments
supported these results. Slightly raising the volume of
the tonal sounds had little effect on the tone sensitivity observed in the
brains of two monkeys.

Finally, the researchers saw similar results when
they used sounds that contained more

natural harmonies
for monkeys by playing recordings of macaque calls. Brain scans showed that the
human auditory cortex was much more responsive than the monkey cortex when they
compared relative activity between the calls and toneless, noisy versions of
the calls.

“This finding
suggests that speech and music may have fundamentally changed the way our brain
processes pitch,” says Conway. “It may also help explain why it has been so
hard for scientists to train monkeys to perform auditory tasks that humans find
relatively effortless.”

Earlier this year, other scientists from around the US
applied for the first round of NIH Sound Health research grants. Some of these
grants may eventually support scientists who plan to explore how music turns on
the circuitry of the auditory cortex that make our brains sensitive to musical
pitch.

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Earlier this year, the AFM moved its headquarters offices in New York City from the sixth floor to the ninth floor at 1501 Broadway—also known as the Paramount Building because it served as the New York headquarters for Paramount Pictures.

At 6:59 pm Monday evening, September 9, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) management issued a “take it or leave it” offer to the BSO Musicians which will be presented to the orchestra for a vote this evening, September 10. The proposal contained wage and benefit cuts of 20%. The federal mediators proposed an extension of negotiations […]